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Unrealistic expectations from Client?
Unfortunately you may run into clients that have big dreams but little knowledge about how to accomplish this. Of course you should listen to the client but don't take everything they say like the word of God so to speak. If things that they are saying don't sound right to you, follow your gut and start asking questions. Ask questions to to the client and your instructors but also to your peers and TA's from other classes, even other professors. More than likely you will find someone who has connections or knowledge about your project. It is also important for you to ask these questions early on in the semester to avoid your project falling behind or getting off track. Example Client's want us to create a device to use in an unique environment without the ability to run any sort of tests in said environment to determine how the material used to create our device will behave. To make matters worse # Most if not all of the clients are first timers when it comes to working with this class # The main clients we were designing the device for have no mechanical or material science backgrounds and were understandably unsure about what they wanted the device to do. # They provided inaccurate information at the start of the project resulting in wastes of time (partly our fault for not double checking) # Set a fixed budget without knowing what would need to be done to create the device or what it would be made out of. # Wanted things that were not possible and took weeks to convinced said things were not possible resulting in more wasted time # Ignored optimum solution because it would take some effort on their end and not ours. It was a heat treatment to correct a problem they were having that we provided instructions for. Instead we had to come up with an alternative that isn't as good and resulted in more time being wasted. (now that the project is complete they will try this solution but again it should have gone with it before we created the alternative) Advice: don't treat your clients like friends you want to please, treat them like co-workers that you hate but need; scenario that happened to us clients: we need you to do X us: X isnt possible for Y amount of reasons clients: we would still like for you to look into X us: but X isnt possible clients: we still want you to look little more into X us: alright we will look a little more in X after 3 conference call telling X isn't going to work they finally stopped asking how it should have gone clients: we need you to do X us: X isnt possible for Y amount of reasons clients: we would still like for you to look into X us: but X isnt possible clients: we still want you to look little more into X us: No its a waste of time for Y amount of reasons clients: we still want you to look little more into X us: No its a waste of time and the more time we don't waste the better our final product will be Sometimes its in your clients best interest to tell them no.